I’ve had my laptop for over a year and a half now, but I’ve never really given it a thorough cleaning. So you could imagine the kind of dust and dirt that it has accumulated by now.

I decided that it was high time that I gave my overworked tool a decent tidying up.

There are a number of high-end, expensive laptop cleaners out there, but nothing beats good old-fashioned (and very cheap) MC Multi-Purpose Cleaning Cream, available at your local groceries and hardware stores. It’s non-reactive, which means that it’s very safe on your equipment’s surfaces, and it instantly lifts off all sorts of grime. Its carnauba wax component should also give a microscopic layer of protection for your device. What’s more, it’s so safe that you could even use it on your LCD screens.

Also needed: a soft cleaning rag (available via your favorite street vendor… or much, much cheaper bought by the bolt at Divisoria), and possibly cotton buds.


Here’s a step-by-step of the cleaning process:

Step One: Remove all power sources. Unplug your laptop and remove its battery pack/s. This is because you’re bound to hit your power button several times over during the course of cleaning, and you wouldn’t want your laptop doing hiccups now.

Step Two: General cleaning. Give your laptop a general rubdown. The nice thing about MC cleaning cream is that it’s so cheap and safe that you could smother your device in it and not worry much. With the soft cloth, apply the MC cream throughout your laptop, even on the LCD screen, and use a dry part of your cloth to rub it clean. Dirt lifts off easily.

Step Three: Clean the keyboard. This is perhaps the most challenging laptop component to tidy up. Unless you have one of those new MacBooks, your keyboard is bound to have deep recesses that do a good job of sucking in dirt and grime. Warning: this step will take a lot of time.

The good news is that you could still use MC cream here, applying liberally on the keyboard itself and rubbing the keys clean. The cream would also go into the recesses, but don’t worry. We’ll take care of that next.

Here’s the tedious part. In order to clean the recesses of your keys without having to disassemble your keyboard, do this: (1) Press down on adjacent keys; (2) Slip the edge of your cloth underneath your target key; (3) Press down on your target key so that it will push your cloth against the keyboard’s base; (4) Slide your rag out so that it cleans the base; and (4) repeat for all your keys. Agh!

(If anybody has a faster way of doing this, let me know!)

Step Four: Touch up hard-to-reach areas. Use the edge of your cloth, or use cotton buds, to clean areas that are difficult to reach, including laptop edges and grooves.

It took some time to clean it up, but my laptop feels fresh again. Phew! I hope I need not do this again for another year and a half…